FEATURE | The Big Interview
Striking impact: sculptures by the award-winning Littlehampton
Welding always look good in front of Goodwood House
dofonline.co.uk
because we are so diverse and nobody
is sitting at a desk waiting for an email
from me.
“When I arrived, we were about a £49m
turnover company with no profitability
and, as a consequence, investments were
funded by borrowing. Now, at the end of
2016, we were just shy of £100m turnover
and we generated around £8m of free
cash. We’ve had double-digit growth
every year since 2008.”
So how did he bring about this
transformation? “First of all, we
stopped investing without having the
cash to support it and started to plan
investments based on what we were
generating,” says Williamson. “As the
business started to grow just fractionally
– 2008 and 2009 were pretty lumpy years
through the worst of the downturn – we
were able to generate small returns and
we carefully invested that. We weren’t
expecting to grow our cash balance but
we were able to prevent it from going
backwards. It was a fairly simple plan
and we invested around £2m a year for
the first couple of years just taking stock
really. From there we were able to set
some quite ambitious plans around
the two main motorsport events – The
Festival of Speed and The Revival –
because there was absolutely an appetite
in the market for those two products.
“We were able to grow our partnership
lines. Hospitality was very resilient and
the retail side just grew and grew which
has been fantastic. We added a day to
the Festival of Speed which, in 2008, had
around 135,000 customers while last
year there were 200,000. That’s a growth
story in itself because the event has not
become breathtakingly more expensive to
build so the yield of that extra 70-80,000
people has been significant.”
Williamson is certain that his prior
experience as finance director helped him
when he moved up to the top role. “Being
FD was hugely important,” he confirms.
“When there is such a fine balance
between success and failure – and the
strength of your balance sheet is almost
irrelevant because it’s not liquid and,
although you have all of these assets, you
are not going to sell them – you have to
have a really strong financial diligence
about you in order to make good
decisions. I think we now have a good
balance between being brave, taking bold
decisions and also keeping the business
on track so when Lord March’s R
DIRECTOR OF FINANCE
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